The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  During that night, Rimington’s Tigers and the Lancers brought him news that made him cancel the plan for the flank march. Some of the enemy were digging in along the banks of the Modder and Riet Rivers either side of the railway bridge which they had just dynamited. The stationmaster, a loyalist, reported that they were burrowing ‘like rabbits’. Major Little of the Lancers put the enemy’s numbers as high as four thousand. Methuen doubted this. But he decided it would be dangerous to leave this force at the Modder River – small as it was – astride the line of communication. He would postpone the flank march till he had seized this position.89

  Methuen began to feel almost jaunty. He was confident that Major Little had greatly exaggerated the numbers of the Boers dug into the river bank. Probably there were only six hundred there.90 The great majority of the eight thousand were back at Spytfontein. He would strike before they expected him. A frontal attack in overwhelming strength.91 ‘So far as I can judge,’ he wrote to Buller,

  We are getting to the bottom of the Boers. It is a mere question of pluck. We are terribly handicapped and I quite understand this country has been the graveyard of many a soldier’s reputation. The maps are of little value, the information obtained still less, as the open country plus Mauser rifles render reconnaissance impossible. People talk of making a detour, or sending a Brigade round a flank, there is no use talking that way with 8,000 horsemen in front of you, a river, and a position not to be turned. The job has got to be done….92

  ‘A mere question of pluck.’ Pluck and surprise. Methuen certainly possessed courage. It was the Boers who had mastered surprise.

  Early next morning, the men of the two infantry brigades began to tramp down across the open veld towards the clumps of trees marking the line of the Modder River. The men were told they would breakfast at the Modder River.

  Silence, except for the swish of the boots in the short, bristly grass, and the ‘hui, hui’ of the thickhead birds.93

  ‘They are not here,’ said Methuen to Major-General Sir Henry Colvile, pointing out the tall poplars on the river bank less than a mile ahead.

  ‘They are sitting uncommonly tight if they are, Sir,’ replied Colvile.94

  Ahead, in a natural earthworks along the Modder, hidden in every hole and crevice along four miles of the winding river banks, three thousand Boer riflemen prepared to deliver the most concentrated rifle-barrage yet fired in the war.95

  CHAPTER 17

  Breakfast at the Island

  Modder and Riet Rivers, Cape Colony,

  28 November – 10 December 1899

  ‘[The hotel] lay now calm and innocent, with its open windows looking out upon a smiling garden; but death lurked at the windows and death in the garden, and the little dark man who stood by the door, peering through his glass at the approaching column, was the minister of death, the dangerous Cronje.’

  Conan Doyle, The Great Boer War

  A couple of hours earlier the same morning, 28 November, the Boer generals had taken their own breakfast of coffee and boerebeskuit (rusks) at their headquarters close to that clump of tall poplars Methuen had pointed out to Colvile.1

  It was a charming spot, this ‘island’, or ‘Mesopotamia’, at the meeting of the Modder (Muddy) River and Riet River. There was a delightfully English look, to homesick colonials, about the stumpy willows on the banks, the emerald-tufted mallard and the rowing-boats moored by the dam at Rosmead, a mile downstream. In fact, this was the Henley of Kimberley, a place for weekend excursions – for wives and children to picnic by the dam, and for the husbands, Rhodes’s men, to play gin rummy on the veranda of the Island Hotel.2 Now the party was over, and the stakes were different. It was this hotel that Piet Cronje and Koos De la Rey – De la Rey, the most austere of the Boer generals – had made their headquarters for battle.

  Among all the Boer leaders of this period, with the exception of President Steyn, De la Rey stands out as morally the most powerful and the most unyielding. It was he who was to keep alight, in its purest form, the fierce flame of Afrikaner nationalism. The grandson of an immigrant from Holland, he and his family had settled at Lichtenburg in the dry, empty plains of the Western Transvaal. De la Rey seemed to epitomize the best side of the Boer character. ‘Oom Koos’ (‘Uncle Koos’), as people called him, was deeply religious; a small pocket Bible was rarely out of his hand. He was a man of formidable looks. The long, neatly trimmed brown beard, the large, aquiline nose and high forehead, the deep-set, glowing eyes gave him, at fifty-two, a prematurely patriarchal appearance.3 And he was a man of formidable silences. When he did speak, rising to his feet in the Raad, people remembered his words. No words of his were to be better remembered than his speech condemning Kruger’s war policy.

  Like President Steyn, De la Rey had believed up till the last moment – correctly – that war was not inevitable. In the final debate in the Raad that September, De la Rey had aligned himself with Joubert and the Progressives. They should continue negotiations, he said; above all, they should not put themselves in the wrong by invading the colonies. If there was to be war, it should be war on their own territory. ‘The Afrikaners have been chased from one land to another, but in all those lands graves were dug for British soldiers. As England’s case is unjust, time will bring her to a fall. Before that happens we have land enough to go on burying British soldiers. But… is it not better to make more concessions as long as … independence remains?’ Kruger taunted him with a charge of cowardice. ‘I shall do my duty as the Raad decides,’ retorted De la Rey. Looking Kruger straight in the eyes, he ended: ‘And you, you will see me in the field fighting for our independence long after you and your party who make war with your mouths have fled the country.’4

  Despite the unprecedented bitterness of this exchange in the Volksraad, Kruger had been too shrewd to dispense with the services of De la Rey once war had broken out. Instead he had appointed him combat general to assist General Piet Cronje, the leader of the Transvaal commandos on the western front, and someone with whom Kruger saw eye to eye. Cronje shared Kruger’s rough peasant ways and his raw courage, but lacked Kruger’s talents. He was short and black-bearded, a buccaneer of a fellow, with a reputation for ruthlessness as native commissioner (an official commission had found him guilty of torturing natives). Not that this had decreased his popularity with the volk. After all, Cronje was one of the heroes of the First War of Independence, and the general who had rounded up Jameson at Doornkop.5

  Relations between De la Rey and Cronje soon became strained. De la Rey had helped strike the first blows of the war, cutting off Kimberley and Mafeking. But he disapproved of both Kruger’s offensive strategy, and the half-hearted way it was conducted; and events seemed to prove him right. Kruger’s offensive strategy was crumbling. Methuen had brushed aside Prinsloo and the Free State commandos at their first encounter, Belmont, and at their second, Graspan, by which time De la Rey and seven hundred Transvaalers had joined Prinsloo’s force. Now there was only the line of the Riet and Modder, and a double row of hills between Methuen and Kimberley: the hills at Magersfontein and Spytfontein. No wonder Prinsloo’s Free Staters fled in confusion after the battle. Even De la Rey’s heart faltered. His own men had had the heart so knocked out of them that they were ‘streaming off to their homes’.6

  Characteristically, the two Presidents – Steyn and Kruger – had risen to the occasion. Cronje was told to withdraw most of his burghers from the siege of Mafeking and ride for his life towards the south. Kruger, old warrior that he was, believed there was only one chance of stopping Methuen from reaching Kimberley: all three groups of commandos – Prinsloo’s, Cronje’s and De la Rey’s – must join hands before Methuen was ready to cross the Riet and Modder.7

  Now the three commanders were gathered at the delightful Island Hotel between the two rivers. Yet the danger was still acute. Taking into account their losses at Belmont and Graspan, their combined force only totalled just over three thousand riflemen, almost all mounted, and supported by only
six or seven Krupp field-guns and three or four I-pounder Maxims. What could they hope to achieve against Methuen’s eight thousand, and that battering-ram of sixteen guns?8

  The two rivers, Modder and Riet, together formed a natural line of defence of remarkable strength. There were the river banks; the rivers had gouged out of the plain a broad shelter trench, with banks up to thirty feet deep. There were also the rivers themselves – deep and muddy. Now that the burghers had dynamited the railway bridge, the only crossing-place at the centre was the old drift (ford) beside it. There were only two other areas where the attackers could cross: by a pair of drifts at Bosman’s Drift, four miles to the east; or by the drift beside the dam at Rosmead to the west, two miles below the meeting of the rivers.

  In fact none of these simple geographical facts had been discovered by the British.9 Unknown to Methuen, a deep moat lay between him and Kimberley. To De la Rey it had suggested a defensive tactic as revolutionary as Louis Botha’s yet unrealized plan, over in Natal, for repelling the British by making a vast moat out of the Tugela River.

  De la Rey had naturally never seen a modern battle before the Battle of Graspan. It had proved a revelation. He was appalled by the commandos’ losses – small as they were compared with Methuen’s – at Graspan and Belmont. He must have known that, if Methuen had had horse artillery and a cavalry brigade to unleash after the battle, these defeats could have become disasters. He thought he knew why they had been defeated. Their basic mistake was in their choice of defensive positions. At both Belmont and Graspan (as in Natal at both Talana and Elandslaagte) the burghers had made a stand on hilltops. In the face of modern field-guns firing shrapnel, the hilltop could become a death-trap.

  So De la Rey’s plan was this. Give up the kopjes, the traditional eyries of the Boer fighter. Dig into the mud of the Riet and Modder, and make this the grave to bury Methuen and his army. It was the best position for the burghers. It was also the last place in which Methuen would expect to find them.10

  At five-thirty that morning De la Rey stood waiting in his trench opposite the ‘island’ and close to the broken railway bridge. He must have seen the tell-tale signs: the smoke of a train steaming north, the frightened coveys of thickhead birds, perhaps some spring buck – and the first lines of mounted khaki figures breasting the purple line of veld a mile beyond the river.11 He himself and most of his eight hundred Transvaalers – his own neighbours from Lichtenburg, Bloemhof and Wolmaranstad – had dug themselves in on the south bank of the Riet. Beside him were his two eldest sons, Adriaan, just turned nineteen, and young Koos, who was sixteen. The General wore civilian clothes like everyone else: the tweed jacket and floppy-brimmed hat that he used to wear on the farm. He carried no arms. Just the two symbols of authority, divine and human: the well-thumbed pocket Bible, and the small sjambok (leather whip) he took everywhere with him.12

  On his left, straddling two miles of the same side of the Riet River, east from the junction point with the Modder, lay Cronje and most of the other Transvaalers. They had their own slit-trenches. Behind them their horses were tethered under the shelter of the banks of the Riet. Beyond them, in the ‘island’ between the meanderings of the two rivers, other burghers were concealed in the undergrowth, in case the British tried to turn the Boers’ east flank at Bosman’s Drift. Dug in beyond De la Rey to the west, and extended as far as Rosmead Drift, were Prinsloo and the Free Staters. They had still not recovered from the mauling they had received from Methuen’s troops at Belmont and Graspan.13

  Whether De la Rey had agreed to the disposition of the artillery is not known. Cronje had concentrated most of his field-guns on the north bank of the Riet River, covering De la Rey’s trenches; that is, four of his Krupp 75-mm field-guns were close to the railway line, commanding the central drift. The other two field-guns, and all three of the I-pounder Maxims, were scattered along the ‘island’, including one field-gun opposite Bosman’s Drift at the extreme east. Not one gun of either sort was backing Prinsloo in his efforts to defend Rosmead Drift on the west.14 It was a mistake on Cronje’s part that was soon to have disastrous results.

  Already, after the first few moments of the British infantry’s advance, it was clear to De la Rey that a second mistake, equally serious, had been committed by Cronje’s men along the banks of the Riet River to the east. Their orders were to hold their fire as long as possible. The farther the infantry advanced towards the two rivers, the more crushing would be the effect of the Boers’ fusillade, and the harder it would be for Methuen to extricate his men. But restraint of this kind is notoriously difficult for untrained troops. The nearest lines of ‘Khakis’ to the angle of the Riet River – actually, the 1st Scots Guards, who were marching forward towards that clump of tall poplars – were at least a thousand yards, and probably nearer twelve hundred yards, from the Boer trenches, when Cronje’s men’s nerve faltered and they opened fire. Naturally the Khakis flung themselves flat. In that wretched fusillade the burghers had lost all chance of a decisive victory.15 Now it was to be an affair of blow and counter-blow: an endless struggle between gladiators, differently armed yet more or less evenly matched – the spitting, drumming hailstorm of Mauser fire against the thunderstorm of 15-pounders.

  How can we describe from the soldiers’ angle of vision that ten-hour duel?

  From the British side, there is no lack of material to reconstruct the scene. To his wife, Methuen wrote, ‘I thought the enemy had cleared off, as did everyone else, whereas Kronje, De La Ray [sic] and 9,000 men were waiting for me in an awful position. I never saw a Boer, but even at 2,000 yards when I rode a horse I had a hail of bullets round me. It seems like Dante’s Inferno out of which we hope some day to emerge.’16

  Methuen himself, like Symons at Talana, put himself at the head of some Highlanders, and led a charge down towards the river. Unlike Symons, he emerged from this daring act unscathed. The charge achieved nothing.17 Both his brigades – on the east of the railway, the Guards Brigade led by Major-General Colvile; on the west, the 9th Brigade, led by Major-General Reggie Pole-Carew – both were nailed down in the veld by the fire of invisible Mausers and some Martini-Henrys.18 ‘If one asked a comrade for a drink of water,’ wrote Ralph, ‘he saw the bottle, or the hand that was passing it, pierced by a dumdum…. Or if he raised his head to writhe in his pain he felt his helmet shot away.’19 For ten hours soldiers lay flat on their faces, hungry and thirsty, nibbled by ants, in a temperature that rose to 90°F in the shade (and a sun that blistered the backs of the legs of the kilted Highlanders). So strong was the craving for water that, despite the orders to hold fast, men tried to crawl back to the water carts, and several were killed in the attempt. From sheer exhaustion – and boredom – others fell asleep where they lay.20

  Such was the battle, seen from the British side: a ten-hour fusillade in their faces from an enemy they never saw. ‘Pom-pom-pom-pom’, went the Boers’ spiteful little I-pounder Maxim, squirting across the sand like a fire-hose. The name stuck.21 As for the sound of several thousand Mausers firing simultaneously, it was like ‘the perpetual frying of fat’, said Julian Ralph, ‘like the ripping of air, like the tearing of some part of nature … hell’s vomit’.22

  What of the ‘ripping of air’ on De la Rey’s side? One of Cronje’s English-speaking burghers, stationed four miles up river from De la Rey, later wrote in his diary,

  The shout went up ‘daar kom de Britische’ (‘there come the British’)… when boom, boom went two shells, bursting about 40 yards above us on the bank. I said to myself, Oh God, I am in it for now…. Now the cry is to get into some sort of cover, but there is not much of that, everyone looking for himself, no order or discipline…. The Maxims kept us here [so] that we cannot move, and along the river, down to the station, the fire is incessant. Artillery and small arms, from both sides. It is simply ‘Hell let loose’. I could never have realized, nor can one who is not here, what it is like…. For two hours I lie on my stomach making myself as small as possible….23
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  De la Rey himself did not use such graphic language in letters or reports. It was not in his nature. Yet there were colours enough in the war, seen from his side of the firing-line; horrors, too. De la Rey came within one footstep of death, and suffered, as we shall see, a crippling loss.

  Despite the initial blunder, made by Cronje’s men, of firing prematurely, the advantage in the battle seemed at first tilted towards De la Rey’s side. Through field-glasses, the Boers could see disaster overwhelm the two leading companies of the Scots Guards: their solitary machine-gun smashed by the Pom-Pom.24 An anxious time followed, and De la Rey blamed Cronje for doing so little to cope with the threat. The Coldstreams worked their way under fire along the bushy banks of the Riet to the east. A few waded across to the island, but this was not a proper ford (they had no map to show them Bosman’s Drift). Colvile ordered them back.25 After that the Guards gave the Boers little to worry about. It was the British artillery who took up the cudgels: the twelve 15-pounders of the 18th and 75th Batteries, firing from only just over the heads of the prostrate Guardsmen; and, escorted to the battlefield by an armoured train, the four 12-pounders of the Naval Brigade. ‘Battery column sections, left wheel! Action front!’ The shrill commands of the British gunners were not audible to De la Rey, but he must have seen the effects: first, the twelve field-guns wheeling and swooping in that strange, Aldershot set-piece, then the regular pattern of flashes, up to four a minute, as the smokeless shells left the muzzles, and the regular pattern of dust kicked up by the muzzle blast.”26